PROVENANCE
Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, California, 1983

LITERATURE
William Moore and Stuart Reid, Celebrating Life: The Art of Doris McCarthy, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1999, reproduced page 126

EXHIBITED
Center for Inter-American Relations, New York City, 1983
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Celebrating Life: The Art of Doris McCarthy, 1999

“I have seen all kinds of marvels in this place that I could have never dreamed of … it makes you want to paint. There is so much to work with, there is so much excitement to create with”

-Doris McCarthy in “Doris McCarthy: Heart of a Painter,” reflecting on painting in the Alberta Badlands

Doris McCarthy is widely celebrated as one of Canada’s great landscape painters. McCarthy’s body of work covers every corner of Canada, from Haidi Gwai to Newfoundland, the Arctic to the Alberta badlands. An ambitious adventurer, from a young age McCarthy embraced the Canadian tradition of painting outdoors – and would ultimately dedicate her life to exploring the land and seeking vistas to interpret and share.

“Badlands with Temple and Mushroom” (1982) is a monumental canvas, painted during McCarthy’s strongest period. McCarthy had received widespread acclaim for her 1970s Arctic paintings, and in 1982 she agreed to be the subject of a documentary. The film “Doris McCarthy: Heart of a Painter” chronicles McCarthy’s life and includes on location footage of McCarthy painting in Dinosaur Provincial Park in southeastern Alberta. McCarthy reflects in the film how a treacherous April snowstorm slowed her RV journey across Saskatchewan, but once they arrived in the park, the “lyrical” landscape was a painter’s paradise. At the film’s conclusion, McCarthy’s studio process is documented - she reviews small oil sketches, watercolours and slides made on location, before beginning on a large badlands painting. From this 1982 trip, “Badlands with Temple and Mushroom” is a masterful example of McCarthy’s ability to describe an atmospheric sense a place, to translate her outdoor experience of a landscape onto canvas. The strange, sculpted forms are rendered using a crisp and distilled palette: corals and pinks provide subtle, warm highlights to the weighty masses, while horizonal contours of the rock face are mirrored in the heavy and striated grey-purple sky. The scene is at once otherworldly, yet real and harmonious – Doris McCarthy at the height of her powers.

McCarthy received the Order of Ontario, Order of Canada as well as numerous honorary degrees. In 2004, the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto Scarborough was dedicated in her name.

This lot includes a VHS copy of the award-winning documentary Doris McCarthy: Heart of a Painter (1983) as well as a copy of the book Celebrating Life: The Art of Doris McCarthy, published by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in 1999 to coincide with the artist’s retrospective exhibition.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars